To Loot My Life Clean

The relationship between Thomas Wolfe and his editor, Maxwell Perkins has been the subject of guesswork and anecdote for 70 years. Scholars have debated Wolfe's dependence on his editor. This volume of 251 letters should clarify the relationship and set the record straight.

Though the efficacy of literary biography has been widely contested by academic theorists, artention to the lives of authors remains an enduring fact of our literary history. Dedicated to Robert N. Hudspeth, editor of the Letters of Margaret Fuller and the Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, the eleven essays in this collection address from a practitioner's perspective the relationship between American literary biography, documentation, and interpretation.

"The Four Lost Men is the first publication of the long version of Thomas Wolfe's story of familial and national reflection set during World War I. Here Wolfe supplies a moving portrait of his dying father, as well as a rich meditation on American history and ambitions. Discussion of the title characters - Presidents James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and Rutherford B. Hayes - provides Wolfe an opportunity to assess the mood and promise of the nation as well as to reflect on the obstacles that had blocked paths toward untapped American potential." "Originally published as a short story of seven thousand words in Scribner's Magazine in 1934 - and later abridged by one thousand words for republication in the 1935 anthology From Death to Morning - Wolfe's expanded tale is published here for the first time in its full length of some twenty-one thousand words."--BOOK JACKET.

Sixty-six thousand words were omitted for reasons of propriety and publishing economics, as well as to remove material deemed expendable by Perkins. Published for the first time on October 3, 2000 - the centenary of Wolfe's birth - O Lost presents the complete text of the novel's manuscript.".

Change in life is inevitable and often unpredictable. But transitions from one stage of life to another have certain identifiable, predictable patterns that can profoundly affect your life and career. Those transitions—the times when your foundations move—are often clear only in hindsight. With knowledge and foresight, however, you can see the roadmap in advance of the journey; you can recognize the signs that tell you where you are. You can consciously enable yourself to make a smooth, stable, yet enlivening transition into the next phase of your adult life. In When Your Foundations Move: The Three Crucial Transitions in Life and Career, author and consultant C. Michael Thompson draws upon established tenets of psychology and adult development to create a guide for recognizing and understanding the patterns of these transitions. Using case studies from his many years as an executive coach and career counselor, Thompson addresses the potential pitfalls and solutions for successfully navigating the three critical transitions common to today’s adults, and for building a solid new foundation for your life, work, and relationships. Instead of seeing them only as challenges, Thompson shows how you can use these periods of transition to enhance the success, significance, and satisfaction of the rest of your life and career.

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was one of the most influential southern writers, widely considered to rival his contemporary, William Faulkner-who believed Wolfe to be one of the greatest talents of their generation. His novels- including Look Homeward, Angel (1929); Of Time and the River (1935); and the posthumously published The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940)-remain touchstones of U.S. literature. In Look Abroad, Angel, Jedidiah Evans uncovers the "global Wolfe," reconfiguring Wolfe's supposedly intractable homesickness for the American South as a form of longing that is instead indeterminate and expansive. Instead of promoting and reinforcing a narrow and cloistered formulation of the writer as merely southern or Appalachian, Evans places Wolfe in transnational contexts, examining Wolfe's impact and influence throughout Europe. In doing so, he de-territorializes the response to Wolfe's work, revealing the writer as a fundamentally global presence within American literature.

As the sole literary editor with name recognition among students of American literature, Perkins remains permanently linked to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe in literary history. Their relationships play out in the 221 letters Matthew J. Bruccoli has assembled in this volume. The collection documents the extent of the fatherly forbearance, attention, and encouragement the legendary Scribners editor gave to his authorial sons. The correspondence portrays his ability to juggle the requirements of his three geniuses.